Rainer Seegers

Rainer Seegers comes from a family of musicians. His grandfather, for many years principal trumpet of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, gave his the necessary musical arsenal for his later career as an orchestral player. After settling with his family in Hanover, Rainer Seegers entered the city’s Musikhochschule to begin his training as a percussionist and timpanist with Albert Schober, and from 1973 to 1977 he studied school music with percussion as his chief subject.
Already active as a substitute in the orchestra of the Hanover Staatsoper from the age of 13, he took up his first permanent engagement as principal timpanist at the Braunschweig Staatstheater. In 1979 he moved to the same position with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, and from 1977 to 1982 he was also a member of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. In 1984 Seegers joined the Berliner Philharmoniker – first as a regular deputy, then, from 1986, in a permanent position as successor to the orchestra’s principal timpanist Werner Thärichen.
His orchestral activities – including chamber music – are complemented by teaching engagements and master classes. Until 1983 on the staff of the Hanover Musikhochschule, he now teaches in the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Orchestra Academy and as a visiting professor at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler Hochschule der Musik. His free time is devoted to entomology. He has collected 100,000 day-flying and night-flying butterflies and written about a number of them. His reference to their acute endangerment has led to two areas in Germany being placed under wildlife protection.

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